 Hello, my name is Hans Kandel and I'm an extension agronomist and I'm going to talk today about growth stages of soybean. When we put the seed in the ground it first swells and it starts to take up the moisture and after a few days it will start to germinate and as you think about the seed coming out of the ground it will have the first part calling the cotyledons. After the cotyledons are there we get two other leaves called the unifoliates and after the unifoliates we actually get the two leaves. We have a trifoliate right three parts of the leaves attached and we call that the trifoliates. So as the plants are developing in the vegetative stages we are looking at building up the factory for using the sunlight and transforming it into sugars and initially those sugars are there to make more of the factory. So we see an increase in the vegetation so it is very important to have a good early season crop. How can we do that? Well we can have more seeds per acre or we can narrow the row spacing so that the seeds are spaced more equally in the row and therefore we have more of the plants intercepting the sunlight early in the season. It is very important especially for that early season crop to have as much solar radiation interception as possible. We go from the v1 states to the v2 states till the plant is reaching about that v7-ish states when we are seeing a transformation going from the vegetative to the reproductive phase when it starts to bloom. However the plant is not done with making more vegetation. It keeps on growing and of course the vegetation that we have is called the canopy. We want to have the canopy closure so that the solar radiation can be fully utilized for the productivity. In this particular field we see that the plant is still green, there is still leaf tissue, it is still vegetative and it is reproductive. When we're talking about vegetative stages we're talking about the v1 states when the first leaf has the first trifoliates. So the trifoliates is we have three leaflets together attached and totally this forms one leaf. So when we're talking about v states one of these we call the v stage v1 with one leaf v2 with two v3 with three leaves. The plant is starting to grow we have one dominant growing point and the growing point is in the center of the plant. If something happens maybe a rabbit comes and eats the top part of that growing point now what will happen is there are some growing points in the axles of the leaf and the stem and they will grow and we form two stems. So the plant I have here has two stems coming out of the center of the plant and the reason is that we had some damage in the center of the dominant growing point. As we look at this plant we can actually look at the scars or at the nodes. So when you start at the soil level you go up the first scars is where the cotyledon leaves were. The second scar is where the unifoliate leaves were and then we start seeing the leaves formed in the stem where we find the v stages. This is the first leaf and you go up the stem to the next leaf which is v2 v3 v4 v5 6 7 8 9 10 to the top. The first leaf v1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11. So as the plant starts to grow it starts to put out several layers of leaves within the canopy. So if we look at the plot behind me here you can see there are various layers of leaves and the top layer is of course here intercepting most of the sunlight. What we want is to have as many leaves intercepting the light and as little as possible of the light going through the canopy to the soil surface. So if we summarize the vegetative stages it is important to get the factory build as soon as possible. We need to get the plants established early in the season to capture more sunlight, have the right amount of plants growing and as possible putting the plants in equidistance so narrower rows will give us more plants. When we have that early season capturing of the sunlight we will go through the phases of v1 v2 and 3 to build up the canopy and what we are wanting to do is to get a closure of the canopy of our crop so that we intercept as much sunlight as we can add the change from vegetative to reproductive. The plant still continues growing and we will still see some leaf development but as the plant matures the leaves will start to yellow because some of the nitrogen will be pulled to the beans.